TripSay: Get Travel Recommendations from Friends

TripSay is designed to let travelers share their experiences with others, connect with people who have similar interests, and benefit from their suggestions and experiences when planning their own adventures.

The trend in travel sites lately has been to provide social networking services along with travel recommendations, so potential travelers can reap the benefits of comprehensive travel tips from the people who actually live in their planned destinations. TripSay is similar, but wants to take the social networking aspect in a different direction. While you can certainly share your travel plans and itineraries with other users, TripSay is designed to let travelers share their experiences with others, connect with people who have similar interests, and benefit from their suggestions and experiences when planning their own adventures.

Most travel services allow you to share your travel experiences with other members, a feature that's becoming more popular as travel sites and services try to build social networking functionality into their sites so members can connect. Services like TripWolf, Placely, VibeAgent, TripTouch, and more all allow you to meet people who live in your area or in the place you're planning to visit, and read the stories and experiences of other members who have been there in the past or are visiting right now. TripSay is no different, and actually might be a little too much like other social travel services for its own good.

TripSay recently emerged from private beta to the public and added a slew of new features to celebrate its new, open doors. The service dispenses with competing with other services for bookings, rentals, travel bargains, deals on hotels, and airline tickets and instead focuses on bringing a social element to travel recommendations. The service invites its members to rate locations that they've been to or lived in, and share stories and tips about those locations on an interactive map that can be searched by other members easily. Additionally, the service allows you to bring in and link media from other sites that help narrate your travel experience, like photos from Flickr or videos from YouTube.

When you log into TripSay, you see your "dashboard," which includes locations that you've rated and marked for review, tips that you've written to share with other members, and an interactive map with points plotted on it for locations you've been, written about, or plan on visiting. As you add more places you're interested and reviews of places you've been and trips you've taken, your map becomes more and more populated, and you can share it with other members. TripSay calls this "building your world." The service thrives on this kind of world building, without it, the map would be bereft of tips, reviews, photos, and videos that guide other members to interesting destinations around the globe.

When you find a location you're interested in visiting, you can find members who have provided travel tips and details about that location. Just click on the destination on the map to bring up photos, tips, ratings and reviews, and tags about the destination. If you find members whose tastes match yours, you can connect with them and browse their other ratings and tips. As you round out your own profile, TripSay can suggest destinations that match your interests, and ratings and tips from members who have interests that you share. Similarly, as you rate and review destinations and provide travel tips to others, you'll find more people who want to connect with you over the places you've visited. Members can even create groups based on their interests, so people looking for tropical getaways can share their experiences without reading about another user's skiing trip.

TripSay's only real problem is that it's not terribly original. It's something of the inverse of a service like InsideTrip, which provides booking information and no social tools, but it's incredibly similar to TripTracker, Placely, and VibeAgent, all of which are already established with growing communities. Time will tell whether there's room in the marketplace for TripSay, but the service is definitely off to a good start. It's community is growing rapidly, and the focus on member-to-member social interaction and information from members instead of travel guides is definitely a strong point.